It’s always interesting when I find my tastes changing, such that something that I have heretofore disliked intensely becomes an object of increasing affection. This has been happening lately in my musical life, as I’ve been listening to a bit of French music from the Impressionist era — composers such as Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.

I’ve always had a difficult time relating to this area of music, because I think the music has more to do with color and evocation of mood than with more purely “musical” goals, such as the development of melodies in accord with the requirement of certain established forms. You won’t find Debussy composing a classical rondo, and you’ll be hard pressed to locate a passacaglia by Ravel. And sonata-allegro form? Forget it.

You don’t even find melody, at least in the sense of a definite theme that can be hummed to oneself after listening to a work. There is melody in the Impressionist music, but it’s a slippery thing — it rises from the depths and sinks again into the musical texture, making it occasionally difficult to ascertain if one is listening to a melody at all, or if it is all part of a larger tonal painting. I find that in listening to Impressionistic music, I must resort to non-musical metaphors to describe it — visual metaphors such as color, physical and emotional metaphors to describe mood. In fact, mood in itself seems to be of prime concern to the Impressionist composer; even though melody and development do exist, they are subservient to mood. The musical architecture, then, seems to me to be more emotional and less formal in nature. For a person like me, whose musical experience is so grounded in the classical tradition, relating to Impressionistic music has been difficult for a very, very long time — so much so that I have always viewed the Impressionists with suspicion; I’ve found Ravel to be a master of orchestration but a composer of cold, lifeless music, while judging Debussy to be a poseur of the highest order, a composer of works that are sometimes enjoyable but at the same time are light and inconsequential. I’ve come lately to revise my views of both composers.

My reexamination of Ravel comes courtesy of his amazing ballet Daphnis et Chloe, which is more familiar to listeners via the Suite #2 which Ravel culled from the complete score of the ballet. I can’t speak to this ballet’s narrative elements, because I am unfamiliar with its story, but I can note that there are moments of supreme transcendence within it, including one breathtaking sequence with a “falling” motif is repeated and developed throughout the orchestra and chorus until reaching an apotheosis of majesty and elemental mystery. This is amazing, wondrous music, and it reveals to me new possibilities for music beyond classical forms — especially in Ravel’s orchestration, which is some of the finest orchestration I have ever heard. (Some of his orchestration anticipates the sound that some film composers, such as Jerry Goldsmith, would employ almost a hundred years later in their film scores.)

As for Debussy, I have been listening both to some of his orchestral works and to his piano Preludes. His musical landscape is less universal than Ravel’s, more suggestive of ethnic color (particularly in a work like Iberia) and more intimate (as in his Preludes for piano). I had always dismissed Debussy as a lightweight, a wine-and-cheese Frenchman whose dull work has eclipsed my own supreme being amongst French composers, Hector Berlioz. That judgement was in error (although I doubt very much that Debussy will ever fire my soul the way Berlioz has for years). Debussy’s music is even more illustrative than Ravel’s, with his use of smaller orchestral ensembles and a “blocking” effect in his sound that yields orchestral sonorities that are much more complex than I have ever given him credit for.

I think sometimes that in this culture of ours, obsessed as it is with speed and with advancement, we sometimes forget all of the wonderful things we have either discounted or missed entirely along the way.

Share This Post

Steven Den Beste just changed the contents of his blogroll, performing an “out with the old and in with the new” kind of operation. I didn’t make the cut, which doesn’t surprise me as I rarely write about the types of things that he writes about and when I do it’s not from his side of the political aisle. But I did find something potentially nifty in exploring his new set of links.

The site in question is Rachel Lucas. This is a site I’ve read a few times before, usually briefly and in passing, because she’s a gung-ho conservative one of whose main inspirations is “hating Al Gore”. I don’t have a problem with that (aside from disagreeing with it), but given that it’s not my particular point-of-view, I would not have ever become more than a sporadic reader of hers. I’m glad I checked her site out today, though, because she has announced a new focus for her blog: she intends to visit with elderly people in nursing homes and such, and transcribe for posterity as many of their stories as she can. (She writes about her intentions and her background for this interest more eloquently.)

This also illustrates the problem I have with The Rittenhouse Review‘s recent decision to impose meta-restrictions on sites hoping to make the blogroll there: the “turning inward”, in the sense of association only with that with which we already agree. When we refuse to engage other people because we know their politics stand in opposition to ours, we inevitably miss out on other things they may be doing that could be more important.

Share This Post

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about the American Dream.

Not so much the standardized vision of the Dream, with the nice suburban house on an immaculate lot bound by a white picket fence and all the trappings that go with it, but the more abstract idea of the American Dream: the idea, central to our society and essential to its functioning, that anyone willing to work hard and show dogged persistence can achieve his or her dreams. The Grapes of Wrath shows just such a family, the Joads of Oklahoma, and it follows them as they engage in a quest for work that is almost Quixote-like, in that at the end when they have worked and worked and worked some more, and in between working have searched for work, they have achieved mere survival. For the Joads, work is not a means to a dream, but a means just to stay alive. The funny thing is, it doesn’t start out that way.

At the beginning of the novel, Tom Joad — the eldest son in the family — is paroled from prison in Oklahoma (this is the Dust Bowl era), and he returns home to find his family already evicted from the family farm (whose fields are now dry, dessicated acres of dust) and preparing to head for California. The occasion for this departure from their ancestral home is the dozens of handbills that have been plastered all over Oklahoma, promising work in the bountiful fields of the Pacific Coastal Plain — work in such abundance that they will be able to save money and follow their respective dreams. As the Joads set out on their journey westward, it is with a sense of optimism, even in the face of the great difficulties they have already faced.

The optimism begins to shift about halfway through their trek to California, when they encounter fellow Oklahomans — but who are heading east, back to Oklahoma. The work, the Joads are told, is not as easily found as they believe, nor does it pay well at all. Nevertheless, the Joads maintain their determination, although it becomes a grim determination. They are going to find good work, if it kills them.

And when they finally arrive in California, they discover that the situation is indeed as dire as they have been told. Competition for jobs is incredibly fierce; the migrant Oklahomans are looked upon with disdain by the Californians (they are derisively called “Okies” and invariably treated as subhumans); they are forced to work for wages that are barely enough to pay for food; they are in turn charged prices for food that are almost extortionary; and whenever the subject is brought up of the workers banding together to demand better treatment, such talk is discouraged because the locals won’t hold with “Reds”. The upshot is that they have no choice at all in what they do, and are instead herded about almost like sheep. Throughout the course of the book, the initial optimism gives way to pessimism and ultimately to a dreary fatalism as the Joads pretty much lose whatever status they once had as individuals and are instead pushed into a kind of indentured servitude and forced to join a subclass of humans who are always present, always necessary, but never taken seriously or allowed any more than what they need to keep from dying on the doorstep.

The Grapes of Wrath ilustrates a problem with the American Dream: that it is possible for people to work as hard as they can, indeed as hard as anyone can, and still not achieve any kind of success beyond base subsistence. How we respond to this problem — if, in fact, we even admit that it is a problem (“That’s not a bug, it’s a feature!”) — lies at the heart of much of our country’s political debate over much of the last century and beyond. And yet, it is not a political novel so much as a depiction of the trials faced by one family and the choices made by its members. The novel’s final scene — in which a character who has been so self-centered as to be insufferable through most of the book performs an act of generosity that is at once shocking and stirring — will linger with me for a long, long time.

Share This Post

I’ve been looking a bit the last couple days at a timeline of the AIDS epidemic.

I suppose I am lucky in that I have not been personally touched by the AIDS crisis — no one I know, and certainly no one in my family, has either died of the disease or even contracted HIV. (This is less certain of people I’ve only known online; there could very well be an AIDS-sufferer among the people with whom I have interacted over the years, but if so, none have been public about it, at least within the scope of my interactions with them.) I do recall being in junior high school when reports first started surfacing about this ghastly disease that was wreaking death in shocking amounts on the gay community worldwide; given that I was in junior high, I’m sorry to admit that the reaction was not fear at a new and horrible ailment but to use AIDS as simply another bit of ammunition for homophobic insults and humor. In a culture where to call something or someone “gay” was to express as much derision about it or them as possible, likewise AIDS became a verbal weapon of sorts. If someone was absent from school, presumably with flu or whatever, someone would invariably say “I’ll bet he’s got AIDS”, and then everyone in earshot would respond with a chorus of Beavis and Butthead-style chortling. I’m glad that I matured beyond such things, but I’m also saddened to note that continued efforts to dispel the notions about AIDS that held sway amongst my junior high classmates are still needed.

Looking over this timeline and noting the growing number of deaths each year, I did a small calculation based on the number of persons who had died of AIDS as of 2000. Assuming a population of 290,000 people, which I recall is fairly close to the results of the 2000 census, the total number of AIDS deaths is equivalent to the entire population of Buffalo, New York….seventy-five times.

Share This Post

It’s funny the signs that one receives, in the course of daily life, that reveal the extent to which one is getting….well, old. Case in point: this morning, the local news program that is on before The Today Show reported a gossip piece about a video game that is apparently in development, in which Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are characters. The program’s anchor — a woman whom I did not think was this young — then said (in as close to a perfect transcript as I can recall): “The Ben-and-J.Lo game is to be based on the arcade classic….hmmmm….I’ve never heard of this one….’Donkey Kong’?”

I was just coming to grips with the fact that there have been entire generations born post-Star Wars, but this is getting weird.

Share This Post

And, the new auctions are up and running (with two more to come tomorrow). Look over to the left and bid. Now. Bid lots. Bid often. You know you want to.

Share This Post

The first big snowfall of the year occurred in Syracuse this weekend. There are now approximately eight inches or so on the ground. The view out our patio door in this apartment is much wider than the view at the Buffalo apartment we recently left; here I can look across a wide section of the local golf course at some distant houses. The effect is that even on the dark days of winter, it’s brighter inside than at our last home.

Share This Post

My initial round of Ebay book auctions has ended, with four of the five volumes offered finding new homes. I will have a new slate of auctions up, either later tonight or sometime tomorrow. Keep an eye on the “Marketplace” section in my sidebar.

Share This Post

There are a couple of Sundays each football season when all hell seems to break loose, when the once-playoff hopeful teams start dropping off the radar and the ones still alive start battling for the right to play in January. Yesterday was one of those days.

:: OK, I keep harping on the Buffalo Bills’ defense every week, but still! You know your team is too loaded on offense when they give up more than 220 rushing yards to the opposing team’s running back, in a non-overtime game, and still win. This was the most rushing yards ever yielded by the Bills to a single player, the previous record having been held in a 1997 game in which Denver’s Terrell Davis riddled them for something like 210 yards. That game, though, was an overtime game. (And I happened to be present at that game, one of two Bills games I’ve ever been to.) Now, if you subtract Ricky Williams’s two touchdown runs, he only had 120 yards rushing. That’s right: his two touchdown runs, by themselves, gained 100 yards: a 45 yard gallop and a 55 yard sprint. I don’t think he made physical contact with a single Buffalo defender — not even to brush against them as he ran by — in either run. Nobody got a hand on him or was even in a position to do so. The defense is so bad that I posit the following: we will know with certainty the prospects for the Bills in 2003, as soon as the free-agent signing period and the draft are over. If they don’t add some significant defensive help — including beef on the line — pencil them in for no better than 7-9 next year, too.

The other annoying thing about the Bills is their lack of discipline and precision. This was Week Thirteen of the season, and most of the key players are at least second-year men, with some — Moulds, Price, Bledsoe, Ruben Brown, Pat Williams — being actual veterans. They commit too many stupid penalties for a team of this level of experience. The Bills are a young team, but they’re not the ragtag collection of rookies and cast-offs that comprised last year’s squad.

Next week: an almost certain loss as the Bills go to New England, whom I still favor to take the division (contrary to my pre-season predictions, darn it all).

:: So Miami finally puts together a big offensive line, a ball-control centered offense, and they finally get the top-flight running back that they haven’t had since….well, I can’t remember the last top-flight running back Miami had. They do all this so as to avert the inevitable December swoon that is their trademark, when they have to go on the road to places like Buffalo and win without putting the ball in the air forty times a game, the way Marino used to do. And it pays off initially in the game: they take early command, getting good pressure on Bledsoe and not allowing his receivers to break free, mostly containing Travis Henry, and using their running game to make the big plays. And then, somehow, they lose because the great players on the Bills’ offense start to play like the great players they are, making circus grabs and executing perfect routes and tricking defensive backs into hesitating just enough so they can get open. The Bills may have won this one by seventeen points, but they might very well have lost it by that many. This game was closer than the score would indicate.

:: Commentators galore are speculating on whether or not that injury to Kurt Warner’s throwing hand has ever really been healed, and it certainly seems not; he can still put a lot of air under the ball but he can’t throw with the precision that’s been his trademark in the last three years. Add to that the obvious problems on his offensive line, and you’ve got the kind of disaster that befell the Rams yesterday. Eight sacks and a bunch of turnovers given up to the Eagles. But I’m also questioning Warner’s leadership, because he doesn’t seem to be the heart and soul of this team, the way Jim Kelly was to the Bills or Joe Montana was to the 49ers. Warner has never brought the Rams back from a fourth-quarter deficit. I think that Warner needs to grow beyond his status as a player with freakish physical gifts into a real, legitimate field marshall for his team.

:: ….but on the flip side of the coin, how about those Eagles, making my preseason Super Bowl pick look pretty good with their smothering defense and competent play by a third-sting QB? Wow!

:: And the Steelers keep pluggin’ away at the AFC North, with Kordell Stewart beginning to put on what’s referred to in baseball as a “salary drive”. He’s a free agent after this year, and he’ll want some team to actually bring him on as their QB, so he’s actually taking advantage of what is probably his last opportunity to look good in a Pittsburgh uniform.

:: Speaking of salary drives, someone should explain the concept to Arizona’s Jake Plummer. Going 14-for-31 for 88 yards and three INTs is not going to bring general managers beating a path to Plummer’s door with anything better than offers to be, say, David Carr’s backup.

:: Michael Vick is the best player I’ve never been able to watch, due to the TV market in which I live. This guy must be exciting, though.

:: Now that there will only be two wild-card teams per conference, it seems a bit odd that both NFC wild-cards are likely to come from the NFC South. I’m thinking Tampa will win the division, with Atlanta and New Orleans also making the playoffs. And isn’t it odd how here we are, with only four weeks left in the season, and there are still thirteen teams of whom it would not be terribly surprising if they won the Super Bowl? So help me, I actually like parity.

Share This Post

The cover article of TIME Magazine this week was about the impending release (but not impending enough, drool drool drool) of The Two Towers, the second film of Lord of the Rings. That article was followed by another, about the more general rebirth of fantasy as a central part of American popular culture. It is a fascinating article, but as a longtime reader and hopeful practitioner of fantasy, I found it a bit disappointing.

Firstly, I’m not sure if the current fantasy boom is really indicative of something deep or if it is more a fad. I’d like to believe that fantasy as a genre is gaining some new respect and that the potential it offers for storytelling and for the exploration of complex themes is at long last to be recognized. It would be nice to see a mainstream magazine’s book review section actually review a fantasy book as a book, instead of conveying a clear message that fantasy is like romance novels — OK in small doses, and as long as when you’re done you dutifully return to your John Updike or Norman Mailer like a good literatus. I’d love it if the current boom led to a weakening of the barriers that mark out the SF and fantasy ghetto, inside which authors like Charles de Lint and Neil Gaiman and Patricia McKillip are valued for the wonderful voices they are but outside which are barely even conceded to exist, when people like Oprah Winfrey sagely announce that they would never read a work of speculative fiction.

The authors of the article seem to view the shift toward the fantastic as happening for two basic reasons: a reaction against technology, and a desire for moral clarity in our own time of darkness. The latter is easily understood — we appear to be looking for comfort in our stories, seeking out tales in which the lines of good and evil are clearly marked, when the villains stand on one side of the battlefield and the heroes on the other, and the heroes and villains alike are unwavering in their pursuit of either heroism or villainy. We are looking for solace in the antiquated moral clarity of fantasy, even as we confront a real world where moral clarity is hard to come by and where the villains are not so easily found. I find this view erroneous, because it seriously underestimates the ability of fantasy to address questions of morality.

It all seems so easy in Lord of the Rings: Frodo, Gandalf and the rest are good, and Sauron and Saruman are bad. Those are the battlelines, and the entire epic is the tale of the confrontation of those two camps. But it really isn’t that simple, because Tolkien introduces a tertiary concept, that of temptation. The acts of evil that precipitate the story and drive it along are committed by persons who were once good. This is an aspect of Tolkien’s good-versus-evil dynamic that is easily overlooked and underestimated.

The lines between good and evil are also initially obvious in the Star Wars films, but then too the lines are blurred through temptation and justification. George Lucas postulates a view of evil that strongly suggests that evil does not arise in a vacuum, but more frighteningly it arises from the misapplication of a desire to do good. This is clearly seen in the way the Republic is not conquered by the Empire; instead, the Republic becomes the Empire. And this doesn’t even begin to discuss the possibilities Lucas raises about the subject of redemption.

Moral clarity is blurred spectacularly in the finest fantasy literature being written today. Guy Gavriel Kay’s seminal novel Tigana, for instance, depicts heroes who are at times less than sympathetic and willing to commit wrongs in the pursuit of their goals, and villains who — while certainly monstrous — are also very human in their motivations. The dualism of Kay’s moral questioning — “Is it possible for good to employ evil in its ends, and can a person be good and still do evil” — is pervasive in the work, part of which makes it so memorable. And then there is George R. R. Martin’s amazing Song of Ice and Fire series, in which as the series now stands — three books completed of a projected six — one would be hardpressed to even name who the villains and heroes are in the work. It goes on and on. Fantasy is not just “knights in shining armor taking on the evil wizard in black”.

The reaction against technology angle is also interesting but faulty. The authors of the TIME article suggest that the current fascination with fantasy may be due to a more pessimistic outlook toward technology and the future on our part, which has in turn resulted in our desire for lands of the past, lands that never were, a time when chivalry was the norm. Since a futuristic utopia does not appear to be in the offing, the authors say, a utopia of the past is desirable instead.

But I’m not really sure that this holds up. The fact that we didn’t get the world of The Jetsons, and don’t seem likely to, does not strike me as a reason for a newfound interest in fantasy. Not in a world of cell-phones, DVD players, MP3 file-trading, a computer in every living room, and cars that look like Star Trek shuttlecraft on wheels. Surely the big Civil War craze of a few years back did not imply an inner desire on the part of all those re-enactors to actually go storming the fields of North Carolina or to spill fresh blood on the field at Gettysburg; but that pop-culture phenomenon — as much as the current fantasy craze — is reflective of something. Something deep in the human soul, which is sometimes latent but always present.

I’m thinking that the current fantasy boom has to do with fantasy’s folkloric underpinnings, its roots in myth and legend and the archetypal stories that have woven through centuries of narratives since before the invention of writing. And there is nothing inherent to fantasy that makes it more successful than other genres at this; consider the above-mention Civil War craze. Yes, that had a great deal to do with American History and the repercussions of that war that are still being felt, but it also had to do with the heroic stories within it, and the treatment of that War in a way that is almost Homeric in nature.

The authors of the TIME article make a tenuous suggestion that the recent years of pop culture in America have been dominated by science fiction franchises, which are now moving aside as the Jetsons future fades from consciousness. But the franchises they name are not illustrative of the point they make. Star Wars, for all its SF trappings, is a fantasy, and an archetypal, Campbellian-structured story to boot. The Matrix is only beginning as a franchise, but its SF acoutrements — like Star Wars, are awash in mythic and religious subtext. Independence Day is not even a franchise. That leaves Star Trek, which alone gives some credence to the authors’ claim of fantasy’s rebirth arising from growing pessimism about the future. But is Trek on the wane because our tastes have changed? or could it also be because of the franchise’s oft-cited decline in quality?

Children’s literature is awash in fantasy right now, what with Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, and Philip Pullman’s brilliant His Dark Materials sequence. Why are the children so entranced? Are they picking up on the pessimism that has reshaped adult attitudes toward fantasy? I somehow doubt that. More likely, I think, that they are responding with the “sense of wonder” that adults tend to lose. There is a reason that Damon Knight once said “The Golden Age of science fiction is twelve”, and I don’t think he was being entirely derisive.

What I think is ultimately at work here is a swinging of the pendulum, away from the Age of Irony. I think we are returning to fantasy, in large part, because we want emotion in our art again. We want excitement, and we want to feel that things matter. We want to cheer the arrival of the Riders of Rohan, to hiss at the turning of Saruman, to dread the fall of Anakin, to cower in the darkness of Khazad-dum, to cry as Padme gives up her children. We want more than what the Age of Irony had to offer in its stories, when jaded cynicism was the rule, when boredom was embraced, and when a rolling of the eyes was the standard emotional reaction. I don’t think fantasy is more popular now because we want escapism from a dangerous world. I think it’s more popular now because we want to savor our world and our reactions to it.

Share This Post